While admitting that South Africa’s load-shedding is here to stay for now, the government would be implementing measures that are set to fundamentally improve South Africa’s energy generation capacity, President Cyril Ramaphosa said in Thursday.
“Over the next few months, as (power supplier) Eskom works to restore its operational capabilities, we will be implementing measures that will fundamentally change the trajectory of energy generation in our country,” Ramaphosa said in Cape Town.
Speaking when he delivered this year’s State of the Nation Address (SONA) during a joint sitting of Parliament, he assured his compatriots that the government was working hard to address the country’s energy challenge, which has seen regular power outages in the past two years.
Ramaphosa added that to meet the energy challenge his government had moved to rapidly and significantly increase generation capacity outside of Eskom by introducing measures that would be implemented in an effort to improve the constrained energy supply.
Eskom recently announced that the probability of load shedding was expected to increase as the power utility carried out its newly developed comprehensive maintenance plan, aimed at fixing its system which is constrained, unreliable and unpredictable.
In addition, he said, a ministerial determination would soon be issued to give effect to the Integrated Resource Plan 2019 – that would enable the development of additional grid capacity from renewable energy, natural gas, hydro power, battery storage and coal.
“We will initiate the procurement of emergency power from projects that can deliver electricity into the grid within three to 12 months from approval.
“The National Energy Regulator will continue to register small scale distributed generation for own use of under one megawatt, for which no licence is required,” Ramaphosa said.
And the National Energy Regulator would ensure that all applications by commercial and industrial users to produce electricity for own use above one megawatt were processed within the prescribed 120 days, he added.
NM/jn/APA